What's better: yes-men or competent-men?

what we got in the gov-a-men

in Hegseth’s defense, all the douchebags dress like this at Princeton

When Pete Hegseth was nominated for Secretary of Defense, there was a lot of talk about his drinking problem. But when he said he’d dry out if we let him run the largest military budget and third-largest standing army in the world, I believed him. Because I don’t think Pete Hegseth is dumb. I think he’s stupid, sure, but he’s smart enough to know that he’s not actually capable of being Secretary of Defense. Surely he knows that he can’t drink while doing it. He’s like a child who somehow becomes an astronaut.

And yet even Hegseth’s booze promise didn’t quiet the whole spectacle of his confirmation, which felt very Trumpesque. A lot of people pointed out that Hegseth was wildly unqualified and he mostly responded: I know you are but what am I?

The confirmation was of course a sort of bullying campaign. Iowa Senator Joni Ernst was on the fence about Hegseth until an avalanche of MAGA folks scared her into voting with Trump. And Hegseth’s confirmation — following Gaetz’ withdrawal from AG — was a clear display of the White House telling the other branches of government to straighten up before they get sawed off.

And though I think Hegseth was willing to cast the booze aside, I’m still unsurprised by the Signal scandal. Because again, Pete Hegseth isn’t actually capable of being Secretary of Defense. Most Secretaries of Defense have spent the past few decades commanding in major theaters. They’ve made some shady moves since then, like that time they sat on Raytheon’s board, but they’re still capable of being Secretaries of Defense. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth spent the past decade on Fox News with a few benders and the occasional stint in the National Guard.

But this is a larger issue of Trump’s own and why Hegseth is typical of our current predicament for the next four years. Trump wants A.) yes-men and B.) competence. But you can’t have it both ways from government employees (who are famously poorly paid). You have to be able to bend a little bit on one of those principles. And yet Trump doesn’t, he’ll always take an incompetent yes-man, somebody with strong social-media-influencer-energy (a la Hegseth or Leavitt), over a competent staffer who might occasionally flinch at obvious humanitarian crimes like deporting innocent hairdressers onto El Salvadorian prisons.

In the first administration, there was a push toward competence. John Kelly, Tillerson, Mattis, hell even Mnuchin and Pompeo. They weren’t brilliant, but they were competent. This time, the push is toward yes-men. A gaggle of well-meaning zombies trodding toward a conman’s mirage of America So Great Again.

And yet Trump is caught, isn’t he? The president is obviously trying to avoid the chaos he had in his first term. The sort of “revolving door” that the press loved about the first White House. So he’s smart enough to want A.) good headlines and B.) competence from his staff but dumb enough not to realize that his yes-men, while shiny on television, are actually pretty bad at their jobs. They are children and he made them astronauts. Of course his Secretary of Defense was posting classified information on Signal like it’s a PUA Reddit forum. What else did you expect the man to do?

Trump blames the Signal scandal on National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, whom he wants to fire — and he will eventually — but he can’t, at least not yet. Because of the bad headlines. Meanwhile, the few halfway-competent administration figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are currently shitting their pants and probing the walls for exits like The Weeknd trying to escape the Super Bowl.

I don’t think Bessent is the only one, by the way. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles seems pretty gobsmacked by the shitshow she somehow turned into the most powerful carnival on earth. There are, from what I’ve heard, quite a few White House staffers who are suddenly realizing that the stock market is in the toilet, a rogue billionaire is ravaging America’s soft power and now even the Canadians hate us.

Nothing dramatic will happen, obviously. The zombies will keep trudging along as though all this is normal. Not our version of normal, maybe. But their version of normal. Until, at some point, something will snap within the populace. And normal people will realize that the people running the government should probably be a lot better at it than this. But who the hell knows when that will be. We only hope it’s only when Honda Civics are $100k and not when we’re all under huddled a bridge eating beans while the wildfires ravage on.